Ocular recognition utilizes captured images of a periocular region of the eye, including the iris. Matching of the captured image to an image from a database is performed. It is well known that when a sharp iris image of a probe is captured and matched with a gallery of sharp iris of targets, excellent identification performance may be achieved. The captured images, however, may be acquired under non-ideal conditions and have varying quality. Such conditions may include non-cooperative moving subjects, varying eye gaze angles and obscured and out of focus iris resulting poor quality images. Matching a poor quality iris image often results in poor recognition performance.